Holiday displays make season bright

News-Times, The (Danbury, CT), Eugene Driscoll THE NEWS-TIMES

Published 1:00 am, Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Maybe it's an unwritten rule for grandmothers. If you see Santa and your grandkids are with you, you've got to stop. Virglee Montgomery followed the rules Saturday when she spotted Santa Claus waving to cars on Arch Street in Danbury. Montgomery pulled her white Dodge Intrepid to the side of the road, opened the door and blurted an excited "Merry Christmas, Santa!"

Montgomery then wriggled 16-month-old grandchild Kalil out of his car seat and into her arms. His eyes went wide, as did those of his older sister, Caress, 7.
The youngsters stared at two front yards belonging to the Evans and Sacrider families. In front of them were hordes of glowing Christmas lawn ornaments, engulfing both yards, climbing up the front porch right onto the roof.
The place had everything from three arching dolphins to Barney and Baby Bop to a glowing "
Happy Birthday Jesus
" - not to mention a real live Santa Claus standing in the driveway, waving.
"Look at all the lights," Montgomery said to her grandson. "He loves lights," she said to Santa.
"That's good. That's why we do it," Santa said.
Santa in this case was Bill Evans. He plays Santa on the weekends.
He and his wife, Charlene, along with neighbor John Sacrider, have put up Christmas lights every winter for about a decade.
The display started out simple enough - a few lights hung on the gutter. A decorated bush here and there.
"We started real small and then we got together and said 'Maybe we should add this, maybe we should add that,'"
Charlene Evans
said.
The thing seemed to take on a life of its own.
"We got a few things and people started to come by, so we started adding more," Bill Evans said. "People kept saying 'I told my neighbor about this,' and more people kept coming. Everybody seems to like it, so it's something to do for two to three weeks a year."
Now it's grown to the point where Charlene maps out the holiday layout in late August, armed with pen and paper as she sits on her front porch. Last year someone knocked on their door and ask them to turn on the lights - too bad it was midnight.
The Evanses make an annual trek to Tennessee, ostensibly to see family, but they always come back with a new Christmas lawn decoration.
Installing the display takes weeks. They start in September by hanging lights off the roof. Bill Evans and neighbor John Sacrider do 99 percent of the work, but Evans' five grandchildren help drag the bounty from the attic.
"People always think we're competing with each other. We're not. We work together," Charlene Evans said.
The families prefer rope lighting - flexible tube lights that come in different colors that are intertwined into the lawn decorations. The result is a multi-colored display that literally stops traffic on the small road.
There's Santa driving a tractor trailer. There's Santa in a helicopter.
There's Tweety Bird, chillin' for the holidays.
Look up top, it's Santa's sleigh, connecting the two houses.
Look in the side yard - it's SpongeBob and Barney. There's even a depiction of Jesus on a crucifix.
"It's so beautiful. It looks like Christmas land," Montgomery said.
Evans said people always ask him about his electricity bill during the weeks leading up to the holidays. It's about four times higher than his normal bill, he said.
Montgomery wasn't the only one to get of her car Saturday. A steady stream of families with young children stopped by to have their picture taken with Evans. Others slowed down and shouted "Merry Christmas."
Evans has been posing as Santa for about three years. He decided to don the outfit as a way to get a better view of the action in his front.
Evans, who works the overnight shift at a chemical company in Bethel, stands outside every Saturday and Sunday after dark for about three hours.
"We put the lights out for the kids to see," he said. "You see them drive by and their eyes look like saucers."
Despite the large number of decorations, there's only been one attempted abduction.
"Last year somebody tried to take my SpongeBob," Charlene Evans said. "We found him tipped over on the side of the house."
The Evanses and Sacriders aren't the only families with over-the-top Christmas decorations.
Nationally, people are spending more money than ever on holiday decorations.
This year Americans will spend almost $8 million on Christmas and Hanukkah, up 5 percent from 2003, according to a survey from Unity Marketing, a company based in Pennsylvania. About half of the people who buy holiday decorations purchase the kind used outdoors.
"This year the hot new decorations for outside are lighted inflatables that depict various Christmas-themed and licensed characters as oversized vinyl balloons," according to
Pam Danziger
, president of Unity Marketing.
The inflatable decorations - such as
Homer Simpson
or The Grinch - cost about $50 each. Not everyone loves them.
"This holiday season everyone has them!" a poster on a Internet message board at Cyburbia.org said. "They are so big. It's like they are the SUVs of holiday lawn ornaments."
Don't tell that to
Sander Zagreda
, 42. His family has an inflatable snowman family on their front lawn on Henso Drive, near Clapboard Ridge Road.
The snowmen act as an exclamation point for an entire yard done up with glowing candles, wooden soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of lights.
Even his children's play house in the back yard is covered with glowing candle lights and Christmas lights.
Zagreda, who works at the Gillette company in Bethel, grew up in a close-knit neighborhood in the Bronx, N.Y. In the city, everyone decorated for Christmas.
"We're Roman Catholics and it's a cultural thing to put up lights," Zagreda said.
Unity Marketing's survey showed that people decorate their homes to get into the holiday spirit. That's obvious. But they also decorate as a trip down memory lane. Favorite decorations trigger nostalgic ruminations.
Aside from being pretty, Zagreda said holiday decorations pull his neighborhood together. He's one of several residents on Henso Drive who go all out for the holidays.
A few houses down, Robin and
Kevin Preusse
have wooden, painted angels on their lawn, along with the standard holiday lights. A speaker attached to a basketball pole plays Christmas tunes.
Neighbors wander the road, checking out the displays. It all leads up to a huge annual Christmas party, which usually involves anywhere from 10 to 15 families.
The neighbors make it a point every year to invite the newest family on the block, which is how Zagreda and his family got to know their neighbors.
"That's the best thing about this neighborhood," he said. "We really like the closeness of our neighbors."